I totally agree with those who earlier said that the biggest loss is consumers' perception. Let me tell you an example.
I live in Italy which until recently, you probably know, has always been Sony's land. What you probably didn't know is how powerful their brand was. Most parents and casual gamers used to call "playstation" any console; the xbox or the gamecube where a different kind of playstation and among young people who you were cool only if you could play the last GTA or Tekken on playstation 2 (and earlier 1). When I tried to talk about other consoles with my friend to make them understand that the xbox (and in part the xbox360) or the gamecube had their good games and features, the only answer was "but the playstation is better!". At the time the Playstation 2 launched, even if the price was really high for the time, half of my friend upgraded almost immedeatly. Playstation was a synonim of "videogames". When the playstation 3 launched, not even one of my friends bought it for 2 main reasons: the ps2 is still cool and the price was too high for gaming. They didn't even care about Blue ray, they wanted to play the new games and they weren't there. No final fantasy, no gran turismo, no tekken, no gta and so on. Some statistics (among my best 14 friends and I):
6th Generation: 12 had a Playstation 2, 1 had a Gamecube, 1 had a Xbox, 1 had nothing.
7th Generation: 2 have a Playstation 3, 4 have a Wii, 3 have a Xbox 360 while most of the others play PES 2009 on playstation 2 for now.
Sometimes even if you know what you are going to lose, you got to go fight. That's part of being a man. Eikichi Onizuka
